Abortion may seem like a quick fix to a problem
but on the long term that quick fix can
turn into a nightmare. In spite of what the pro choice folks have told you and
what the abortion industry touts, the long term effects can be
devastating.

Our thanks to Sarah Terzo for
gathering these quotes from many sources. There is more truth in the
following quotes than you will find in a mountain of opinion. Just the
bare, unvarnished facts:

Think of it this way- what is
the best way to learn about abortion? To actually witness an abortion first hand
or to work in a clinic. The second best thing is to read verified eye-witness
accounts from people who are current and former abortion providers. These quotes
have been tracked down from a number of sources, from the research of pro-choice
author Magda Denes to the Washington Post to other magazines.

Verify the facts of fetal
development in an encyclopedia or reference book (I suggest K.L. Moore's "The
Developing Human, Clinically Oriented Embryology" 3rd edition, 1982). Look in
the yellow pages of the phone book to see clinics advertising to perform
abortions through the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy.

Why do we need informed
consent laws or mandatory counseling for women having abortions? Don't the
clinics give accurate information about the fetus?

"Counselors are just to give
the appearance of help. . . [They] think of themselves as company for the
women."

--abortion
counselor

"I have never yet counseled
anybody to have the baby. I'm also doing women's counseling on campus at Albany
State, and there I am expected to present alternatives. Whereas at the abortion
clinic you aren't really expected to."

"It is when I am holding a
plastic uterus in one hand, a suction tube in the other, moving them together in
imitation of the scrubbing to come, that woman ask the most secret question. I
am speaking in a matter-of-fact voice about 'the tissue' and 'the contents' when
the woman suddenly catches my eye and says 'How big is the baby now?' These
words suggest a quiet need for definition of the boundaries being drawn. It
isn't so odd, after all, that she feels relief when I describe the growing buds
bulbous shape, its miniature nature. Again, I gauge, and sometimes lie a little,
weaseling around its infantile features until its clinging power
slackens."

"Vital signs should be
observed regularly, and a Doppler [for listening to the fetal heartbeat]
inaudible to the patient should be used at intervals to determine the presence
or absence of fetal heart tones.. This [informed consent] is a controversial
area, but most professionals in the field feel that it is not advisable for
patients to view the products of conception, to be told the sex of the fetus, or
to be informed of a multiple pregnancy".

"Sonography in connection
with induced abortion may have psychological hazards. Seeing a blown-up, moving
image of the embryo she is carrying can be distressing to a woman who is about
to undergo an abortion, Dr. Sally Faith Dorfman noted. She stressed that the
screen should be turned away from the patient." --"Obstetrics and Gynecology
News" editorial February 15-28, 1986

"In my facilities, I always
gave option counseling. Of course you make the abortion the most appealing. I
told them about adoption and about foster care and about [when there was
welfare] assistance. The typical way it would go is, "Well, you know you can
place your baby out for adoption." But then, in the second breath you would say,
"That's an option available to you, but you also have to realize that there's
going to be a baby of yours out here somewhere in the world you will never see
again. At least with abortion you know what's happening. You can go on with your
life...The longer I was in it, the less I cared, so I really didn't really care
what my conscience said. My conscience was totally numb anyway. But what it did
do was public relations-wise. You were able, when a reporter or TV crew came, to
pull out a packet of information for the patients to read and they received it.
So what can anybody say? Publicly it looked good -- in reality it was another
tool that was used to force a woman into abortion. It's typical -- I would give
them an option and then shoot it down. The only option you didn't shoot down,
obviously, was abortion."

"I was trained by a
professional marketing director in how to sell abortions over the telephone. He
took every one of our receptionists, nurses, and anyone else who would deal with
people over the phone through an extensive training period. The object was, when
the girl called, to hook the sale so that she wouldn't get an abortion somewhere
else, or adopt out her baby, or change her mind. We were doing it for the
money."

"They [the women] are never
allowed to look at the ultrasound because we knew that if they so much as heard
the heart beat, they wouldn't want to have an abortion."-Dr. Randall

'Pro-Choice 1990: Skeletons
in the Closet" by David Kuperlain and Mark Masters in Oct "New Dimensions"
magazine

Every woman has these same
two questions: First, "Is it a baby?" "No" the counselor assures her. "It is a
product of conception (or a blood clot, or a piece of tissue). . .How many women
would have an abortion, if they told them the truth?"

--Carol Everett, former owner
of two clinics and director of four "A Walk Through an Abortion Clinic" by Carol
Everett ALL About Issues magazine Aug-Sept 1991, p 117

"If a woman we were
counseling expressed doubts about having an abortion, we would say whatever was
necessary to persuade her to abort immediately."

--Judy W., former office
manager of the second largest abortion clinic in El Paso, Texas

"We tried to avoid the women
seeing them [the fetuses] They always wanted to know the sex, but we lied and
said it was too early to tell. It's better for the women to think of the fetus
as an ‘it’.

--Abortion clinic worker
Norma Eidelman quoted in Rachel Weeping p 34

"The counselor at our clinic
would cry with the girls at the drop of a hat. She would find their weakness and
work on it. The women were never given any alternatives. They were told how much
trouble it is to have a baby."

"When discussing the
sonogram, you are supposed to tell the client that it is a measurement as far as
the pregnancy is concerned, but not a measure of the fetal head or anything like
that."

--Rosemary Petruso, on her
training to be an abortion counselor. Her story appeared in the St.

Louis Review and was also
quoted in "Women Exploited: The Other Victims of Abortion" Paula

Ervin, editor. Huntington:
Our Sunday Visitor, 1985

"Sometimes we lied. A girl
might ask what her baby was like at a certain point in the pregnancy: Was it a
baby yet? Even as early as 12 weeks a baby is totally formed, he has
fingerprints, turns his head, fans his toes, feels pain. But we would say 'It's
not a baby yet. It's just tissue, like a clot.'"

"When I first started working
there [at the clinic], I had to sit and listen to women answering the phone for
at least a month before they would allow me to answer the phone. We had to know
exactly what we were doing when we were talking to these women. We had to find
out very quickly what their problem was, play on that and get them in the clinic
for an abortion. We were very good salespeople."

-Joy Davis

"In fact many women will come
to me considering abortion, and I have been personally told that I am to turn
the monitor away from her view so that seeing her baby jump around on the screen
does not influence her choice."

Shari Richards, quoted from
the John Ankerburg Show on 3/7/90

"When a girl called to make
her appointment, we'd work her in as soon as possible. If she called on Tuesday,
we'd have her in no later than Friday. We wanted to avoid a long waiting period
where she'd have time to think about it. First she would fill out her forms, and
then talk with a counselor. . . The counselors were trained in what areas to
cover and which to avoid. They'd say, "I know this is a terrible situation
you're in. What can we do to help make this better for you? Yeah, it doesn't
sound like you're ready for a pregnancy right now." Their task was to keep the
machinery moving - to get the woman into the procedure room as quickly as
possible."

---clinic worker, name
withheld

"There was a public health
center in a town not far from Denver and they sent a lot of girls to us. They
told us they did all the counseling. We weren't allowed to counsel them or even
ask them about birth control. We couldn't even tell them what could happen
during the abortion. Nothing. If we tried to discuss alternatives, we

would get in trouble with the
doctor because then the health center

would threaten to send their business elsewhere. All we
did wasfind out how far along they were, tell
them when they were goingto be finished, get
their money, do the abortion, and send themhome."

--Registered nurse Sam
Griggs

From "Abortion Clinics: An
Inside Look" published by Last Days Ministries.

"I have seen hundreds of
patients in my office who have had abortions and were just lied to by the
abortion counselor. Namely 'This is less painful than having a tooth removed. It
is not a baby.' Afterwards, the woman sees Life magazine and breaks down and
goes into a major depression."

Why is there so much fuss
about abortion? Isn't what is removed only a mass of tissue?

"But when I look in the
basin, among the curdlike blood clots, I see and elfin thorax, attentuated, its
pencilline ribs all in parallel rows with tiny knobs of spine rounding upwards.
A translucent

arm and hand swim
beside."

--Sallie Tisdale "We Do
Abortions Here"

"I can remember...the
resident doctor sitting down, putting the tube in, and removing the contents. I
saw the bloody material coming down the plastic tube, and it went into a big
jar. My job afterwards was to go and undo the jar, and to see what was
inside.

I didn't have any views on
abortion; I was in a training program, and this was a brand new experience. I
was going to get to see a new procedure and learn. I opened the jar and took the
little piece of stockingnette stocking and opened the little bag. The resident
doctor said "Now put it on the blue towel and check it out. We want to see if we
got it all.' I thought, "that'll be exciting-hands on experience looking at
tissue.' I opened the sock up and put it on the towel, and there were parts of a
person in there.

I had taken anatomy, I was a
medical student. I knew what I was looking at. There was a little scapula and an
arm, I saw some ribs and a chest, and a little tiny head. I saw a piece of a
leg, and a tiny hand and an arm, and you know, it was like somebody put a hot
poker into me. I had a conscience, and it hurt. Well, I checked it out and there
were two arms and two legs and one head and so forth, and I turned and said "I
guess you got it all.' That was a very hard experience to go through
emotionally.

--Former
abortionist

"Saline abortions have to be
done in the hospital because of the complications that can arise. Not that they
can't arise during other times, but more so now. The saline, a salt solution, is
injected into the woman's sac, and the baby starts dying a slow, violent death.
The mother feels everything, and many times it is at this point when she
realizes that she really has a live baby inside her, because the baby starts
fighting violently, for his or her life. He's just fighting inside because he's
burning."

--Debra Harry

"One night a lady delivered
and I was called to come and see her because she was 'uncontrollable.' I went
into the room, and she was going to pieces; she was having a nervous breakdown,
screaming and thrashing. The other patients were upset because this lady was
screaming. I walked in, and here was this little saline abortion baby kicking.
It had been born alive, and was kicking and moving for a little while before it
finally died of those terrible burns, because the salt solution gets into the
lungs and burns the lungs too. I'll tell you one thing about D& E . You
never have to worry about a baby's being born alive. I won't describe D & E
, other than to say that, as a doctor, you are sitting there tearing, and I mean
tearing- you need a lot of strength to do it- arms and legs off of babies and
putting them in a stack on top of the table."

--Dr. David Brewer of Glen
Ellyn Illinois

"I remember an experience as
a resident on a hysterotomy. I remember seeing the baby move underneath the sack
of membranes, as the cesarean incision was made, before the doctor broke the
water. The thought came to me, "My God, that's a person" Then he broke the
water. And when he broke the water, it was like I had a pain in my heart, just
like when I saw that first suction abortion. And t hen he delivered the baby,.
and I couldn't touch it.. I wasn't much of an assistant. I just stood there, and
the reality of what was doing on finally began to seep into my calloused brain
and heart. They took that little baby that was making little sounds and moving
and kicking, and set it on that table in a cold, stainless steel bowl. Every
time I would look over while we were repairing the incision in uterus and
finishing the Caesarean, I would see that little person moving in that bowl. And
it kicked and moved less and less, of course, as time went on. I can remember
going over and looking at the baby when we were done with the surgery and the
baby was still alive. You could see the chest was moving and the heart was
beating, and the baby would try to take a little breath, and it really hurt
inside, and it began to educate me as to what abortion really was."

quoted in "Pro-Choice 1990:
Skeletons in the Closet"

"Following [the doctor's]
directions, I took the collection bottle and poured its contents into a shallow
pan. Then I used water to rinse off the blood and smaller particles which
clouded the bottom of the pan. 'Now look closely,' the doctor said. 'It is
important that we have got all the stuff out.' I looked in the pan to find that
the stuff consisted of the remains of what had been, a few minutes before, a
thirteen week old fetus. I could make out the remains of arms and legs and a
trunk and a skull. I tried to piece them back together in my mind, to see if
there were any missing parts. Most of the pieces were so battered and bloody
they were not recognizably human. Then my eyes locked upon a perfect little
hand, less than half a centimeter long. I stared at four tiny fingers and a tiny
opposed thumb, complete with tiny translucent fingers. And I knew what I had
done."

"I have been there, and I
have seen these totally formed babies as early as ten weeks... with the leg
missing, or with their head off. I have seen the little rib cages..."

--Debra Harry

"We all wish it were
formless, but its not...and its painful. There is a lot of emotional
pain."

--abortion clinic
worker

Quoted in "The Ex
Abortionists: They Have Confronted Reality" Washington Post April 1, 1988 pg
21

"You have to become a bit
schizophrenic. In one room, you encourage the patient that the slight
irregularity in the fetal heart is not important, that she is going to have a
fine, healthy baby. Then, in the next room you assure another woman, on whom you
just did a saline abortion, that it is a good thing that the heartbeat is
already irregular....she has nothing to worry about, she will NOT have a live
baby...All of a sudden one noticed that at the time of the saline infusion there
was a lot of activity in the uterus. That's not fluid currents. That's obviously
the fetus being distressed by swallowing the concentrated salt solution and
kicking violently and that's to all intents and purposes, the death trauma.
..somebody has to do it, and unfortunately we are the executioners in this
instance..."

--abortionist Dr.
Szenes

"And then to see, to be with
somebody while they're having the injection when they're twenty or twenty-four
weeks, and you see the baby moving around, kicking around, as this needle goes
into the stomach, you know."

--Susan Lindstrom,
M.S.W.

"I look inside the bucket in
front of me. There is a small naked person in there, floating in a bloody
liquid- plainly the tragic victim of a drowning accident. But hen perhaps this
was no accident, because the body is purple with bruises and the face has the
agonized tauntness of one forced to die too soon. I have seen this face before,
on a Russian soldier lying on a frozen snow-covered hill, stiff with death, and
cold."

Also quoted Magda Denes,
"[the doctor] pulls out something, which he slaps on the instrument table.
"there," he says, "A leg." . . . I turn to Mr. Smith. . . He points to the
instrument table, where there is a perfectly formed, slightly bent leg, about
three inches long. . . "There, I've got the head out now." ...There lies a head.
It is the smallest human head I have ever seen, but it is unmistakably part of a
person."

"If I see a case...after
twenty weeks, where it frankly is a child to me, I really agonize over it
because the potential is so imminently there...On the other hand, I have another
position, which I think is superior in the hierarchy of questions, and that is
"who owns this child?" It's got to be the mother."

--Dr. James MacMahon, who
performs D & X abortions, in Nat Hentoff "It's Just Too Late: Third
Trimester abortions are an Outrage and an Insult to the Human Race" July 27,
1993 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Describing an abortion that
apparently did not prevent the child from being born alive, Dr. Haskell said
this, "It came out very quickly after I put the scissors up in the cervical
canal and

pierced the skull and spread the
scissors apart...in the previous two, I had used the suction to collapse the
skull."

--Dayton Daily News Sun Dec
10 1989

"The first time, I felt like
a murderer, but I did it again and again and again, and now, 20 years later, I
am facing what happened to me as a doctor and as a human being. Sure, I got
hard. Sure, the money was important. And oh, it was an easy thing, once I had
taken the step, to see the women as animals and the babies as just
tissue."

--abortionist quoted from a
radio talk show by John Rice in "Abortion" Litt D.
Murfreesboro,

TN.

"I have never known a woman
who, after her baby was born, was not overjoyed that I had not killed
it."

--Abortionist Aleck Bourne "A
Doctor Speaks" London Express, Jan 25

"We know that its killing,
but the state permits killing under certain circumstances"

--Dr. Neville Sender,
abortionist

"Even now I feel a little
peculiar about it, because as a physician I was trained to conserve life, and
here I am destroying it." --abortionist

"There was not one [doctor]
who at some point in the questioning did not say "This is murder."

--Magda Denes on her two
years of research done for her book In Necessity and Sorrow; Life and Death
Inside an Abortion Clinic.

Also

"I do think abortion is
murder- of a very special and necessary sort. And no physician ever involved
with the procedure ever kids himself about that."

"You know there is something
in there alive that you are killing"

--another abortionist
interviewed by Denes

"Clinic workers may say they
support a woman's right to choose, but they will also say that they do not want
to see tiny hands and tiny feet....there is a great difference between the
intellectual support of a woman's right to choose and the actual participation
in the carnage of abortion. Because seeing body parts bothers the
workers."

--Judith Fetrow, former
clinic worker from San Francisco quoted in "Meet the Abortion

Providers III" from a taped
conference in Chicago 4/3/93

..the emotional turmoil that
the procedure inevitably wreaks on the physicians and staff...There is no
possibility of denial of an act of destruction by the operator...the sensations
of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric current."

"Remember, there is a human
being at the other end of the table taking that kid apart. We've had a couple of
guys drinking too much, taking drugs, even a suicide or two."

--Dr. Julius Butler, a
professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Minnesota Medical
School

"Arms, legs, and chests come
out of the forceps. It's not a sight for everybody"

--Dr. William Benbow Thompson
at the University of California at Irvine

"Abortion Practice" by Warren
Hern, M.D., Boulder Colorado Abortionist published in 1984 by the J.B. Lippenott
Company. Hern performs abortions up until the 4th month of pregnancy

"The procedure changes
significantly at 21 weeks because fetal tissues become much more cohesive and
difficult to dismember" p 154

"A long curved Mayo scissors
may be necessary to decapitate and dismember the fetus." - p 154

"The aggregate fetal tissue
is weighted, then the following fetal parts are measured, foot length, knee to
heel length, and biparietal diameter" p 164

"Television interviews in
particular should focus on the public issue involved (right to confidential and
professional medical care, freedom of choice and so forth) and not on the
specific details of the procedure." p 323

"Nobody wants to perform
abortions after ten weeks, because by then you see the features of the baby,
hands, feet. It's really barbaric."

--abortionist quoted in M.D.
Doctors Talk About Themselves by John Pekkanen p 93

"I was for abortion, I
thought it was a woman's right to terminate pregnancy she did not want. Now I'm
not so sure. I am a student nurse nearing the end of my OB-GYN rotation at a
major metropolitan hospital and teaching center. It wasn't until I saw what
abortion really involves that I changed my mind. After the first week in the
abortion clinic several people in my clinical group were shaky about their
previously positive feelings about abortion. This new attitude resulted from our
actually seeing a Prostaglandin abortion, one similar in nature to the widely
used saline abortion. . . this method is being used for terminations of
pregnancies of sixteen weeks and over. I used to find rationales. the fetus
isn't real. Abdomens aren't really very swollen. It isn't 'alive.' No more
excuses...I am a member of the health profession and members of my class are now
ambivalent about abortion. I now know a great deal more about what is involved
in the issue. Women should perceive fully what abortion is; how destructive an
act it is both for themselves and their unborn child. Whatever psychological
coping mechanisms are employed during the process, the sight of a fetus in a
hospital bedpan remains the final statement."

"The doctors would remove the
fetus while performing hysterotomies and then lay it on the table., where it
would squirm until it died. ..They all had perfect forms and shapes. I
couldn't

take it. No nurse
could."

--Joyce Craig, director of a
Brooklyn clinic of Planned Parenthood. who assisted in abortion for two months,
then quit. p 34

Edward Eichner, director of
medicine at a Cleveland abortion facility said "No doctor, for ethical, moral or
honest reasons wants to do nothing but abortions...women don't like to do
abortions over and over for moral reasons. Sometimes our women doctors become
pregnant themselves, which upsets the patients. At the same time, if a woman is
carrying a baby, she doesn't like to abort someone else's. We have much more
trouble keeping women doctors on the staff than men." --p 49

"After an abortion, the
doctor must inspect these remains to make sure that all the fetal parts and
placenta have been removed. Any tissue left inside the uterus can start an
infection. Dr. Bours squeezed the contents of the sock into a shallow dish and
poked around with his finger. "You can see a teeny tiny hand' he said.
--abortion clinic worker quoted in "Is the Fetus Human?" and in Dudley
Clendinen, "The Abortion Conflict: What it Does to One Doctor" New York Times
Magazine Aug 11 1985 p 26

"From May to November 1988, I
worked for an abortionist. He specializes in third trimester killings. I
witnessed evidence of the brutal, cold blooded murder of over 600 viable,
healthy babies at seven, eight and nine months gestation. A very, very few of
these babies, less than 2%, were handicapped...I thought I was pro-choice and I
was glad to be working in an abortion clinic. I thought I was helping provide a
noble service to women in crisis....I was instructed to falsify the age of the
babies in medical records. I was required to lie to the mothers over the phone,
as they scheduled their appointments, and to tell them that they were not 'too
far along' Then I had to note, in the records that Dr. Tiller's needle had
successfully pierced the walls of the baby's heart, injecting the poison what
brought death...one day, Dr. Tiller came up the stairs from the basement, where
the mothers were in labor. He was carrying a large cardboard box, and ducked
into the employees only area of the office so that he wouldn't have to walk
through the waiting room. He passed behind my desk as I sat working on the
computer, and he turned the corner to go around a short hall. He called out for
me to come and help him. the box was so big and heavy in his arms that he
couldn't get the key into the lock. So I unlocked the door for him, and ,
pushing the door open, I saw very clearly the gleaming metal of the crematorium-
a full sized crematorium, just like the one's used in funeral homes. I went back
to my computer. I could hear Dr. Tiller firing up the gas oven. A few minutes
later I could smell burning human flesh. Mine was the agony of a participant,
however reluctant, in the act of prenatal infanticide."

--Luhra Tivis on her
experience in the abortion business Quoted in Celebrate Life Sept/Oct 1994
"Where is the Real Violence?"

From the film "Meet the
Abortion Providers" "My heart got callous to against the fact that I was a
murderer, but that baby lying in a cold bowl educated me as to what abortion
really was."

--former abortionist Dr.
David Brewer

"I want the general public to
know what the doctors know- that this is a person, this is a baby. That this is
not some kind of blob of tissue."

--Dr. Anthony
Levantino

"I have taken the lives of
innocent babies, and I have ripped them from their mother's wombs with a
powerful suction machine"--McArthur Hill, M.D.

"I am deeply troubled by my
own increasing certainty that I have in fact presided over 60,000 deaths. There
is no longer serious doubt in my mind that human life exists from the very onset
of pregnancy"

"I dare say that any
thinking, caring individual can't not realize that he is ending life, or
potential life." --abortionist

"[Powell] said "Is this a
fair way of expressing what you have just said, Doctor? You tell the mother
"because your baby is defective, you have the right to kill it or not to kill
it. If you choose to kill it, I will do the killing." "Of course," he [the
abortionist] said. "There is no other way to say it and be honest."

both from The Zero People pg
9

"I wanted to be the world's
best abortionist, for the good of my patients. If I was going to do this, met
each patient, reviewed the medical information gathered by my nurse, examined
the patient and performed the abortion, I would then carefully sift through the
remains to be sure all the parts were accounted for. I had to find four
extremities (two arms and two legs) a spine, a skull, and the placenta, or my
patient would suffer later from an incomplete abortion...My attention was so
focused on my perceived patient that I managed to deny that there were, in fact,
two patients involved- the expectant mother and a very small child...I had to
wonder, how can having a child be so wrong for some people that they will pay me
to end its life?"

"Abortions are very draining,
exhausting, heart-rending. There are a lot of tears. Some patients turn on
you...I do them because I take the attitude that women who are going to
terminate babies deserve the same kind of treatment as women who carry
babies...I've done a couple thousand, and its been a significant financial
boon...the only way I can do an abortion is to consider only the woman as my
patient and block out the baby."

--abortionist quoted in M.D.
Doctors Talk About Themselves

From the article "Abortion
Providers Share Inner Conflicts" which appeared in the July 12 1993 issue of AAA
News, a publication of the American Medical Association:

"I have angry feelings at
myself for feeling good about grasping the calvaria, for feeling good about
doing a technically good procedure that destroys a fetus, kills a
baby."

"When I put my hands on
somebody to feel how big they are and I get kicked, I am barely able to talk at
that moment."

an abortionist stated that
'somebody had asked her what they could say to the staff to make them look less
shocked when they look at a 20 week fetus.. "It's hard to be in a profession
where you have a hard time answering the questions that other people ask you
about what you do."

From World magazine August
1995

"You would just look in the
buckets and see arms and legs. I have horrible dreams about that now. It was
something you would see in a scary movie."

--Former clinic worker
Kirsten Breedlove

"The babies were frozen in a
freezer. Now I wished I had not looked." --Norma McCorvey

"Even if you are pro-choice,
no one likes to see a dead fetus." -Vilma Valdez, Education Director Planned
Parenthood of Greater Miami, The Miami Herald, Oct 24 1992

"I went up to the lab one day
and on the pathologist's table I saw what I thought was little rubber doll until
I realized it was a fetus. . .I got really shook up and upset and I couldn't
believe it. It had all its fingers and toes, you know, hands and feet. . . I
never thought it would look so real. I didn't like it."

In an interview by Mark
Crutcher, former abortion clinic director Joy Davis said "Each person who worked
there had a different way of dealing with it. [One] would look at the ultrasound
the entire time she was in the room, but she would never look down in the pan.
She would never look at the tissue being removed. She never wanted to see that.
She would never take her eyes off the screen. And I had one who would never look
at the screen....she would never look at the tissue and never look at the
screen, she just didn't want to see anything."

Also from the 1993 Chicago
conference "Planned Parenthood is set up so clinic workers never have to see the
babies. It's set up that way because having to look at the babies bothers the
workers. ...Generally there is one clinic worker in charge of the babies...I was
that clinic worker. I had to look at the babies. I had to store them, I had to
send them to pathology. And I was the person who had to dispose of them.....in
order to maintain my sanity, I established a personal mourning ritual. I said
Shiva for the babies. I said prayers for the dead. I also named the babies as I
put them in a waste container."

"It [the fetus] is a form of
life...This has to be killing...The question then becomes "is this kind of
killing justifiable? In my own mind, it is justifiable, but only with the
informed consent of the mother" --abortionist quoted in "Democrat and Chronicle"
7/5/92

From the Dallas Observer
3/18/95

Former clinic administrator
Charlotte Taft, "We were hiding from the women some of the pieces of truth about
abortion that were threatening....It is a kind of killing."

From "Abortion at Work:
Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic" by Wendy Simonds. New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1996

Quotes from clinic
employees:

"You're going from dealing
with people to dealing with what most people here at the Center consider a real
hurdle, to do sterile room, because you have to deal with the actual abortion
tissue. And for some people, that's really hard. They can be abstractly in favor
of abortion rights, but they sure don't want to see what an eighteen-week
abortion looks like."

"It's just- I mean it looks
like a baby. It looks like a baby. And especially if you get one that comes out,
that's not piecemeal. And you know, I saw this one, and it had its fingers in
its mouth...it makes me really sad that that had to happen, you know, but it
doesn't change my mind. It's just hard. And it makes me just sort of stop and
feel sad about it, the whole necessity of it. And also....it's very warm when it
comes into the sterile room because it's been in the mother's stomach. It feels
like flesh, you know..."

"It's going to be weird now
because you're going to see the sono. You're going to see the heart beating-
little hearts, you know- and then, all of a sudden, you're going to put his
cardiac medicine in it to make it stop- to kill it. So you're going to see the
exact moment when you kill the fetus. I won't kill it, the doctor will kill
it...and, I mean, it might be more humane...[if] the fetuses do feel something,
why not kill it, you know, fast, [rather] than rip its leg off?"

"I feel some sadness [about
abortions] and I think part of the problem is that we don't talk about that...we
don't talk about it as much as we think about it...somehow your pro-choice
stance is compromised by saying the word "baby."...We don't allow ourselves to
say or think that word...."

"At nine weeks...you start
seeing fetal parts. And by the second trimester it's, you know, it's a baby, and
by eighteen weeks it's definitely a baby. And by like, you know, twenty-two
weeks, you go in and you watch someone do a sonogram, and you're like, "Oh my."
There it is just moving, moving around. And it's really hard because I always
thought of abortion in terms of just the woman, just her body."

"You're looking between the
woman's legs; you're seeing, you know, what the doctor's doing. And it's what a
lot of people would call kind of, I guess, gruesome- that's not really the word
because- it's identifiable. I mean, when he...takes the forceps and pulls out a
foot, you can see the foot, and my reaction- because I feel so strongly that
women who want to have a twenty week abortion should be able to have that- but I
mean when I look and was just like, you know, my first reaction was, you know, I
was pretty horrified."

"So by it looking like a
baby, you're associating it with yourself because...you used to be a baby, you
used to be a fetus."

"...when you're, you know,
putting a fetus's feet in over its head in a baggie, there's just this brief
moment of "This could have been me," which I fundamentally believe is okay. She
should have the right to choose..."

"...it looks like a baby,
That's what it looks like to me. You've never seen anything else that looks like
that. The only other thing you've ever seen is a baby...You can see a face and
hands, and ears and eyes and, you know...feet and toes...It bothered me real bad
the first time..."

"The destruction I can't
deny....I wish we lived in a world where abortion didn't have to
exist."

"You know, we still say
"products of conception." Well, why don't we say it looks like- you know, a
twenty-week fetus looks like a baby. Why can't we say that in public? Because
that's what the antis say, you know."

"I think the tough part was
seeing actual pieces of fetus being removed. And in the beginning, yes, I
remember looking, standing behind this woman's shoulder [as she performed an
early second- trimester-abortion] and thinking, "I can't do this...There's
something emotionally upsetting about this. Features are discernible; you can
count five fingers on a hand and five toes on a foot. You know, all the organ
systems are formed. You know, you can see ears as structures, and the nose and
eyes as structures...I have gotten to the point now that because I've been doing
this work five months, four months, I look at it a little differently. I don't
see the same things that I did. And, honestly, when I sit down to do one of
these now, I am watching to be sure that I'm getting everything that I need to
get. It's 'Do I have two lower extremities? Do I have two upper extremities? Is
t here a spine? ...and the skull?...It does become a bit routine after a while.
I don't fear it."

"I hate it when people put it
together to look like a baby. I hate that...I don't want to look like it when
its like that because it's like a broken doll, and that grosses me
out."

From the author: "Many health
workers told me they 'never look at the face' when processing
tissue."

"Another thing that bothered
me as I went about my work at the clinic was the fact that I had seen an
ultrasound abortion. We did first trimester abortions. This was a late first
trimester, probably

second trimester. I handled
the ultrasound while the doctor performed the procedure and I directed him while
I was watching the screen. I saw the baby pull away. I saw the baby open
his

mouth. I had seen the Silent
Scream a number of times, but it didn’t effect me. To me it was just more
pro-life propaganda. But I couldn’t deny what I saw on the screen."

--Joan Appleton, former
clinic worker

"So when I went back to doing
abortions and saw the fetus on the ultrasound, I recalled the early days of my
pregnancies, when I found out I was pregnant and saw the baby on the ultrasound,
and it really felt like this is a baby, a very real and potential being. Now, I
do feel that this is a potential person and it does not have a life of its own
outside of the mother, but I also am really aware that when you're ready to
embrace a pregnancy, you can embrace it from the very moment you conceive or are
aware that you are pregnant. Faye Wattleton said recently, "I think we have
deluded ourselves into believing that people don't know that abortion is
killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our
ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus, but it is the
women's body, and therefore ultimately her choice." I believe that very firmly.
You look at the ultrasounds and there's a fetus with a heartbeat and then after
the procedure, there's the fetus, usually in pieces, in a dish. It was alive one
moment and it's not the next. I don't believe it's a painful experience for the
fetus because its nervous system is not "wired" so that it can feel pain at that
point. I don't believe, as some anti-abortion people would have you believe,
that there's a "silent scream." But it's very clear to me that it's killing a
potential life. And I found that hard at first. "

I hated putting babies in strainers and rinsing them off and putting them in
zip-lock bags.--former abortion clinic owner Eric Harrah

By Dr. Arnold Halpern, former
director of a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic "There is no difference between
a first trimester, a second trimester, a third trimester abortion or
infanticide. It's all the same human being in different stages of development. I
finally got to the point I couldn't look at those little bodies
anymore."

An abortion doctor describes
his job: "... As you get into the second trimester, if we remove the pregnancy
using forceps, and if a heartbeat is the measure of being alive, that happens
all the time." Dr. Dennis Christensen, Madison Abortion Clinic, Wisconsin. From
The New York Times; May 15, 1998; page A14.

"I worked as an assistant
nurse at Dr. Haskell's clinic for three days--September 28, 29, and 30, 1993. .
. . On the third day, Dr. Haskell asked me to observe as he performed several of
the procedures that are the subject of this hearing [D&X abortion, also
called partial birth abortion]. Although I was in that clinic on assignment of
the agency, Dr. Haskell was interested in hiring me full time, and I was being
given orientation in the entire range of procedures provided at that facility. I
was present for three of these partial-birth procedures. It is the first one
that I will describe to you in detail. The mother was six months pregnant (26
1/2 weeks). A doctor told her that the baby had Down's Syndrome and she decided
to have an abortion. She came in the first two days to have the laminaria
inserted and changed, and she cried the whole time. On the third day she came in
to receive the partial-birth procedure. Dr. Haskell brought the ultrasound in
and hooked it up so that he could see the baby. On the ultrasound screen, I
could see the heart beating. As Dr. Haskell watched the baby on the ultrasound
screen, the baby's heartbeat was clearly visible on the ultrasound screen. Dr.
Haskell went in with forceps and grabbed the baby's legs and pulled them down
into the birth canal. Then he delivered the baby's body and the arms--everything
but the head. The doctor kept the baby's head just inside the uterus. The baby's
little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his feet were kicking. Then the
doctor stuck the scissors through the back of his head, and the baby's arms
jerked out in a flinch, a startle reaction, like a baby does when he thinks that
he might fall. The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction
tube into the opening and sucked the baby's brains out. Now the baby was
completely limp. I was completely unprepared for what I was seeing. I almost
threw up as I watched the doctor do these things."

My official title at the mill was "health worker." I did various duties-lab
work, leading groups (deceiving women about their abortions), "advocating"
(deceiving women during their abortions), and assisting the abortionist, which
included helping during the abortion and checking to make sure all the parts of
the baby were therein the collection jar afterwards. I will never forget, in the
second-trimester abortions, holding those little feet up to a chart on the wall
to make sure of the age of the baby.---Dina Madsen

My 23rd abortion changed my mind about
doing abortions forever. This patient was a little overweight and ultimately
proved to be a little farther along than anticipated. This was not an uncommon
mistake before ultrasound was readily available to confirm the gestational age.
Initially, the abortion proceeded normally. The water broke, but then nothing
more would come out. When I withdrew the curette, I saw that it was plugged up
with the leg of the baby which had been torn off. I then changed techniques and
used ring forceps to dismember the 13 or 14week size baby. Inside the remains of
the rib cage I found a tiny, beating heart. I was finally able to remove the
head and looked squarely into the face of a human being -- a human being that I
had just killed.-Dr. Paul Jarrett

From Norma McCorvey's book Won By
Love:

At least 80 percent of the women would try to look down at
the end of the table, wondering if they cold see anything which is why our
doctor always went in with the scalpel first. Once the baby was already cut up,
there was nothing but blood and torn up
tissue for the woman to see. When a later abortion was performed, workershad to piece the baby back together, and every major
part--head, torso, twolegs, and two arms --had
to be accounted for. One of our little jokes at theclinic was, "If youever want to humble a
doctor, hide a leg so he thinks he has to go back in."Please understand, these were not abnormal, uncaring women working with
meatthe clinic.
We were just involved in a bloody, dehumanizing business, all ofus for our ownreasons. Whether
we were justifying our past advocacy (as I was), justifyinga previous abortion (as many were) or whatever, we were just
trying tocope--and if we couldn't laugh at what
was going on, I think our minds wouldhave
snapped. It's not an easy trying to confuse a conscience that will not stay
dead.--Hearing on H.R. 4292, the "Born Alive Infant Protection Act of
2000"

Testimony of Jill L. Stanek, RN:

I am a Registered Nurse who has worked
in the Labor & Delivery Department atChrist Hospital in Oak Lawn,
Illinois, for the past five years. The method of abortion that Christ Hospital
uses is called "induced laborabortion," also now
known as "live birth abortion." This type of abortioncanbe performed different ways, but the
goal always is to cause a pregnantwoman's cervix
to open sothat she will deliver a premature baby
who dies during the birth process orsoon
afterward. The way that induced abortion is most often executed at myhospital is by the physician inserting a medication
called Cytotec into thebirth canal close to
thecervix. Cytotec irritates the cervix and
stimulates it to open. When thisoccurs, the small, preterm baby drops out of the
uterus, oftentimes alive.

Itis not uncommon for one of these live aborted
babies to linger for an hour

ortwo or even longer. One ofthem once lived for almost eight hours. In the event that a baby is aborted alive, he or she receives
no medicalassessments or care but is only given
what my hospital calls "comfort care.""Comfort
care" is defined as keeping the baby warm in a blanket until he orshe dies, although even this minimal compassion is not always
provided. Itisnot required that these babies be held during their short lives. One
night, a nursing co-worker was taking an aborted Down's Syndrome babywhowas born alive to our
Soiled Utility Room because his parents did not wanttohold him, and she did not have time to hold him. I could not bear
the thoughtof
thissuffering child dying alone in a Soiled
Utility Room, so I cradled and rockedhim for the
45 minutes that he lived. He was 21 to 22 weeks old, weighedabout ˝ pound, and was about 10 inches long. He was too weak
to move verymuch, expending anyenergy he had trying to breathe. Toward the end he was so
quiet that Icouldn't tell if he was still alive
unless I held him up to the light to seeif his
heart was still beating through his chest wall. After he waspronounced dead, we folded his little armsacross his chest, wrapped him in a tiny shroud, and carried
him to thehospital morgue where all of our dead
patients are taken.

From the book "Past Due" by Anne Finger, published by
The Seal Press in 1990:

"I am
walking out the back door, and I see a plastic jar of tissue and bloodwaiting to be sent to the path lab, and in the plastic
jar a tiny perfectwhite hand. . . That flat palm
reaching up through a wine-red wash of blood.Why
does that stay with me?

Quoted from the woman.com message
board:

When I first started out nursing in the late 70's I
was working for theOb/Gyn physicians in this hospital. My duties
were not only to care forthosethat were in for abortions, I also cared for the older folks
havinghysterectomies and so forth. I
didn'thave a personal opinion on abortion until
I saw how many were done and forthe multitude of
ridiculous reasons. Not to mention the actual procedureitself and the "aftermath". It wasn't until a few years afterwards that
Istarted to feel this wasn'tright. That is when I transferred to a different department
and hospitalcompletely. . . Plus you must
understand, I worked for a hospital smack dabin
the middle of NYC, I got to know some of the girls getting theseabortionson a first name
basis, sincethey had them so often. That really
got under my skin, seeing these girlsusing it as
a birth control measure. And why shouldn't they? The state paidfor it anyway! Just not right.

Regarding the Phrase "Late-Term Abortions"

On a related point: the news media does the public a disservice with its
sloppy use of the phrase "late-term abortion." Many organs of the press say that
the bill before these committees would ban certain "late-term abortions."
However, when the pro-abortion lobby and the White House use the phrase
"late-term abortion" nowadays, it is code for "third-trimester abortion." So
this bill and President Clinton would both restrict so-called "late-term"
abortions, according to the news media. Yet, more than 90% of the abortions that
would be banned by the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act are not
third-trimester abortions.

Therefore, this careless use of the phrase "late-term abortion" -- usually
adopted in an effort to avoid the term adopted by Congress, partial-birth
abortion -- engenders a confusion that is very much to President Clinton's
advantage. This confusion misleads the public into the erroneous belief that the
Clinton-Daschle proposal largely overlaps with this bill to ban partial-birth
abortions -- and that is exactly the impression that President Clinton and
Vice-president Gore have worked hard to create. But this is a deception, because
the Clinton-Daschle proposal would place no limitations on the thousands
of partial-birth abortions performed on healthy babies of healthy mothers in the
fifth and sixth months of pregnancy.

Pro-abortion Disinformation Campaign Revealed

Since this legislation was originally introduced in
June, 1995, we have seen a concerted disinformation campaign by the leadership
of the major pro-abortion lobbies. They emphatically insisted, in writing and on
the airwaves, that the procedure banned by the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act is
performed only 500 or so times annually, and only in the most extreme medical
circumstances.

This disinformation campaign experienced a setback in late January with the
release of an edition of the PBS media-criticism program Media Matters
that examined how the press has covered the partial-birth abortion issue [2],
and then received a far harder blow last month when Ron Fitzsimmons, executive
director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers (NCAP), admitted in
interviews first with the American Medical News and then with numerous
other news outlets that he had lied when he made such claims in an interview
with ABC News Nightline. [3]

The importance of this admission was not that Fitzsimmons himself had lied on
one occasion -- after all, that portion of his Nightline interview never
even aired. The important point is found in Fitzsimmons' explanation for what he
said during the Nightline interview: "I just went out there and spouted
the party line." [Knight-Ridder, Feb. 28, emphasis
added.]

The "party line" referred to, of course, was the
"party line" disseminated by the leaders of the major Washington-based
pro-abortion lobbies-- the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action
League (NARAL), the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), and the
National Abortion Federation (NAF). I will discuss this campaign in more detail
later in this testimony.

Dr.
Martin Haskell Starts the Debate

The debate over the partial-birth abortion method
-- as a discrete facet of the overall debate on the practice of abortion --
really began in earnest in 1993, when NRLC obtained a copy of a paper in which
Ohio abortionist Martin Haskell described in detail, step-by-step, how to
perform the procedure.

Dr. Haskell is a family practitioner who has performed over 1,000 such
abortions in his walk-in abortion clinics. Anyone who is seriously seeking the
truth behind the conflicting claims regarding partial-birth abortions should
start by reading Dr. Haskell's paper, and the transcripts of the explanatory
interviews that Haskell gave in 1993 to two medical publications, American
Medical News (the official AMA newspaper) and Cincinnati Medicine. [4]
(I have included these materials with several other attachments to my written
testimony, and would ask that they be made part of the hearing record.) Here is
how Haskell explained a key part of the abortion method:

With a lower [fetal] extremity in the vagina, the
surgeon uses his fingers to deliver the opposite lower extremity, then the
torso, the shoulders and the upper extremities. The skull lodges at the
internal cervical os [the opening to the uterus]. Usually there is not enough
dilation for it to pass through. The fetus is oriented dorsum or spine up. At
this point, the right-handed surgeon slides the fingers of the left hand along
the back of the fetus and "hooks" the shoulders of the fetus with the index
and ring fingers (palm down).... [T]he surgeon takes a pair of blunt curved
Metzenbaum scissors in the right hand. He carefully advances the tip, curved
down, along the spine and under his middle finger until he feels it contact
the base of the skull under the tip of his middle finger.... [T]he surgeon
then forces the scissors into the base of the skull or into the foramen
magnum. Having safely entered the skull, he spreads the scissors to enlarge
the opening. The surgeon removes the scissors and introduces a suction
catheter into this hole and evacuates the skull contents." [5]

Haskell wrote that he "routinely performs this
procedure on all patients 20 through 24 weeks LMP [i.e., from 4 1/2 to 5 1/2
months after the last menstrual period] with certain exceptions," these
"exceptions" involving complicating factors such as being more than 20 pounds
overweight. He also wrote that he used the procedure through 26 weeks [six
months] "on selected patients." [p.28] He added, "Among its advantages are that
it is a quick, surgical outpatient method that can be performed on a scheduled
basis under local anesthesia." [p. 33]

So, the partial-birth abortion method is generally used beginning
at 20 weeks­­ which is the middle of
the fifth month of pregnancy. The plastic medical models displayed by NRLC since
this debate began in 1995 is a medically accurate representation of the average
human being at 20 weeks. The seven ­inch surgical scissors, which we also
regularly displayed at hearings and press conferences, is the Metzenbaum
surgical scissors specified in Haskell's paper. It is used to pierce a human
being's skull.

ATTENTION: National
& Health Desks

Death Rate of Abortion Three
Times Higher than Childbirth

13-year Population
Study in Published in Top OB/Gyn Journal

Springfield, IL (March 5, 2004) -- A study of pregnancy-associated deaths
published in the latest issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and
Gynecology has
found that the mortality rate associated with abortion is 2.95 times higher
than that associated with pregnancies carried to term. The study included the
entire population of women 15 to 49 years of age in Finland between 1987 and
2000. The researchers linked birth and abortion records to death certificates.

The annual death rate of women who had abortion
in the previous year was also 46% higher than that of non-pregnant women.
Women who carried to term had a significantly lower death rate than
non-pregnant women. Non-pregnant women had 57.0 deaths per 100,000, compared
to 28.2 for women who carried to term, 51.9 for women who miscarried, and 83.1
for women who had abortions. The authors, led by Mika Gissler of Finland's
National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health, concluded
that pregnancy contributes to a healthy effect on women.

The study also revealed the difficulties involved
in identifying direct and indirect effects of pregnancy on subsequent deaths.
An examination of deaths from natural causes that were identified as "not
pregnancy related" revealed that women who had abortions were significantly
more likely (1.7 times) to die from natural causes that were not attributed to
pregnancy on the death certificates. They were also 6.3 times more likely to
die from violent causes.

This is the second record-based study to be published in the last eighteen
months to show that the death rates following abortion are significantly
higher than those associated with birth. The other study, published in the a
Southern Medical Journal, linked death records
to Medi-Cal payments for births and abortions for approximately 173,000 low
income Californian women. In that study, the researchers discovered that women
who had abortions were almost twice as likely to die in the following two
years and that the elevated mortality rate of aborting women persisted over at
least eight years.

An unexpected finding in both the Finnish and the
American studies was an elevated risk of death from cardiovascular diseases.
This finding was most dramatic in the American study which examined longer
term effects. It found that compared to women who delivered, those who had
abortions were significantly nearly three times more likely to die of
circulatory disease and five times more likely to die from cerebrovascular
disease during the subsequent eight year period. Researchers believe that
higher levels of depression and anxiety following abortion may explain this
result.